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Feb 2, 2024 · 2 February 2024. Johann Sebastian Bach was a great composer – according to information theory. The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo. Johann Sebastian Bach is considered one of the great ...
Feb 16, 2024 · Physicists found that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach contains mathematical patterns that help convey information. Bach's prelude for klavier score. Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian ...
- Elise Cutts
Feb 5, 2024 · Read more: ‘Happy Birthday’ – but it’s in the style of a Johann Sebastian Bach fugue. J.S. Bach and his family gather round the keyboard in an 1870 portrait. Picture: Alamy To be able to mathematically analyse it, Bach’s music was deconstructed into a network-like diagram charting how information is passed through a series of notes.
Feb 19, 2024 · Mathematical patterns and structures in Johann Sebastian Bach's music are legendary. Many avenues have been taken into the mathematical analysis of his work, but some of them are especially…
- Sam Vaseghi
- Mathematics and Music
- Examples of Bach’s “Mathematics”
- The Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Numbers in Bach’s Music
- Summary
- For Further Reading
- For Further Listening
Just as some of the best musicians and composers are “mathematical,” so too many of the best mathematicians are quite musical. It is quite common at evening receptions of large mathematical conferences to be serenaded by concert-quality musical performers, who, in their day jobs, are accomplished mathematicians of some renown. So who were Einstein’...
Bach was a master of musical structures. His works typically start with a fairly simple theme. In the case of the Brandenburg Concerto #5(BWV 1050), it is a simple four-note pattern. He then typically combined the theme with offsets (think of a chorus singing “rounds”), reversals, inversions and other variations, all presented with multiple overlap...
Perhaps the most remarkable “mathematics” in Bach’s music are the instances of the golden ratio, usually denoted with the Greek letter ø = (1 + sqrt(5))/2 = 1.6180339887…, together with the Fibonacci numbers, whose limiting ratio is equal to ø (i.e., the Greek letter phi). Loic Sylvestre and Marco Costa pursue this topic at length in a 2010 paper (...
In short, while it is problematic to claim any equivalence between mathematics and music, it is clear that the two disciplines have a deep commonality in syntax, structure and recursion. Bach, arguably more than any other composer before or since, clearly championed this “mathematical” style, even though Bach never had any formal mathematical train...
For further details, see these articles: 1. Qian’s article on Bach’s techniques. 2. The Sylvestre-Costa paper (also available here). 3. Rosen’s article on The Musical Offering. 4. Article on Einstein, emphasizing his love of Bach and Mozart. 5. Article on Bach and Glen Gould.
Here are a few notable examples of Bach’s music for those who wish to explore further. Each of these is available on CD or download from various sources, such as Amazon.com or Apple Music. Two highly recommended complete collections of Bach’s works are: Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CDs) and The Complete Bach Edition(153 CDs). One very nice onl...
May 25, 2017 · Johann Sebastian Bach was the grand master of structural innovation and invention in music. While his compositions are the free creations of a genius, they have a fundamentally mathematical basis.
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The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 is one of Johann Sebastian Bach's finest masterpieces, a true testament to his achievement as a composer. The Art. of Fugue is the last of Bach's great monothematic cycles, after the Musical Of- fering BWV 1079, the Goldberg Variations BWV 988, and the Canonic Varia- tions on «Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her» BWV 769.
